By skyforbes 
In an era of booming social networks, it’s easier to find lost friends and colleagues than it ever was before. The private world of yesterday is now an online world. Everyone with a search engine has open access to social networks, government databases, and public records.
If you’re looking for a long-lost friend, or maybe want to do a background check on someone, consider the following free resources to find people on the internet.
How to Search for People for Free on the Internet
The internet is essentially a giant database, overflowing with data points about individuals. Today, it’s hard to find anyone who hasn’t commented on a blog entry, made a post in an online forum, or registered at Facebook or Flickr.
Different sites use this information in different ways. While the following 13 sites can be used to find people online, they may draw the data from different sources. As a result, there may be some differences between the results.
Before starting, learn a few details about the person. Start with their birthday or the state they live in. Once you have those details, the volume of information you can find online about a person is amazing. In fact, it can sometimes prove overwhelming.
When searching for people online, be sure to use multiple search engines for the best results.
There are many websites that search standard social networks like Facebook or Twitter. But Pipl Search is one resource that conducts a deep web search for the name on “non-typical sites”. The search results from Pipl Search are impressive.
Pipl Search makes a big effort to uncover street addresses, phone numbers, and even family members, scraped from miscellaneous websites.
The app used to be free to use, but you now need to sign up for a subscription. Indeed, the platform is now aimed at businesses who want to do identify verification and investigations rather than individual users.
Probably the most powerful tool to find someone online who used the internet a long time ago is Google Groups. Google Groups has incorporated over 800 million Usenet messages into its database, an impressive archive of internet conversations dating back to 1981.
For example, if the person you’re looking for attended university during this time, you might find a trace of them. Usenet’s channels were a popular way for people to access the internet before its explosion in the late 1990s. Universities, research centers, tech businesses, and other bodies relied on Usenet for collaboration and more.
Not only you might find who you’re looking for, but you’ll also get an idea about their thoughts, ideas, and motivations of the time. Remember, if you’re worried about people finding old information about you, there are ways to tell who is tracking you online.
A free people search service, TruePeopleSearch delivers some good results. But it depends on where you’re based.
For US readers, this is a great tool, and by simply searching for a name and state of residence, you’ll find surprisingly in-depth results. You should also get some good results for Canadian residents, too.
Look out too for the “Possible Associates” section. Useful to law enforcement and private eyes, this displays names of past college roommates, colleagues, and more. No doubt scraped from public Facebook information, this is reliable information.
TruePeopleSearch will typically return a list of previous addresses, along with phone numbers. This list is free to view with some basic information, but more detailed reports are available for a fee. Perhaps the site’s branding of “100% free” isn’t quite true.
Like True People Search, Find People Search generates basic background check information. Still, that information can be extremely helpful when you’re trying to learn more about someone. What this website brings to the game is that it offers more extensive information than others.
However, again, like True People Search, this site doesn’t offer results from outside of North America. What it does, though, it does well. For example, after selecting a likely candidate, Find People Search provides a list of the likely locations of your quarry.
Family information might also be listed here, depending on what data has been collated for the individual. You could find an important familial link here, such as a brother, sister, or even an aunt, uncle, or cousin.
While most people search engines scour public information and not much else, PeekYou goes the extra mile to dig into popular social sites like Pinterest, LinkedIn, Instagram, and more. You can search for people by username too.
The results are always impressive, although they can be somewhat garbled. For example, a search for my own records mixed up details about me with those of others with similar names. Also, PeekYou offered up a new middle initial, which was certainly surprising!
As with all these sites, keep in mind that the data collected might be inaccurate. This could be due to mistakes in the source data, or errors when names are matched.
Sometimes tracking someone down requires a little bit more creativity than just typing a name into a search engine. Another approach is to rummage through the popular high school reunion website Classmates.
Obviously, you will need to have some idea of the high school the person attended. If successful, you’ll find a listing of people who’ve registered on the site with the same high school on record.
Start off by selecting a school by state and city, then enter the name of the student to search for. Many people are registered on the site, so you should stand a good chance of finding who you’re looking for. Though a great site to find your old friends, Classmates is a US-only website.
Various genealogy sites can be used to trace individuals, although the process is a little different.
When it comes to genealogical records, information might be restricted for people who are still living. This will depend on data privacy laws and the policy of the genealogy site. As such, while it might be useful to establish familial links with whomever you’re searching for, the information will be scant.
The results page will display address information and possible relatives, while paid background information can also be generated via PeopleFinders. FamilyTreeNow is a good option for genealogy research. Interested in family history? There are plenty of websites you can use to trace genealogy.
Want to track someone down, and you only have a photo of them? Use a reverse image search tool like TinEye. This site will turn the entire internet inside out for that same picture, and it’ll show you if it was uploaded anywhere else.
The site uses an innovative image recognition technology that can match images based on the one you upload to the site. It’s an impressive technology, and it worked the first time I tried it, immediately identifying that I had uploaded that same picture to MakeUseOf. And, it even recognized the picture when only part of the image matched the original. Very impressive stuff.
Another search engine to search for faces is Google Image Search.
Google is also an effective tool to track someone down online. Before trying, keep the following tips in mind.
- Enclose the person’s full name in quotes (like “David Lee Roth”). Google will return only search results with the person’s full name.
- Include more information that you already know about the person (like “Sammy Hagar” ex-Van Halen singer). Your search results will be even more precise.
- If the person is involved with a certain organization, try searching only that site (like “site: extreme-band.com “Gary Cherone””). If the person is listed as a staff or contact on the site, you’ll discover their details.
These tips work well–give them a try! In fact, searching for people with Google works so well that people search sites that existed years ago have closed. Who needs those when Google already does it best?